The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) first showed the use of the cloud in 2012. It also sent the 50%-owned stockbroking business, CommSec, to Amazon Web Services (AWS) at that time.

Being a part of AWS Summit Online Australia and New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn said that CommSec could be considered a “perfect use case” for cloud flexibility.

“If I just simply contrast the trading volumes through the GFC, where we were trading about 100,000 trades per day, and they were on our own data centres, and some of the difficulties that we had to be able to flex to that peak, and then contrast that during COVID, where it was broadly about four times that trading volume, it’s a really good use case for the flexibility and power that you get from an AWS instance being able to spin up that extra capacity at short notice, and to be able to deal with a very significant peak in activity over that time,” he said.

“As we look forward … it’s now about getting many more of our core workloads onto the cloud, making sure that, for the applications that are really important to us — where we think there’s going to be a lot of change — we want them to be running natively on the AWS experience and leveraging a lot of the capabilities and product innovation that [AWS is] building,” the CEO said.

“And then, of course, leveraging with some of those other core workloads, some of the benefits that you get either from a lower marginal cost than we’d get from running our own data centres, but also just higher resilience and availability.”

He also thinks it is equally important to deliver a robust engineering experience for its software engineers.

“They’re able to spend their time building out and improving the products and services that we provide, rather than trying to set up infrastructure or environments for themselves,” he continued.

The CEO also said that he meets fortnightly with the bank’s top engineers to understand what they require and how he can make their lives easier and productive.

In July 2020, he also talked about CBA’s plan to send the majority of apps to the cloud.

“A big part of what we think strategically is we want to reimagine the products and services that we provide to our customers,” he added.

“So we very much see our cloud strategy as one that we want to facilitate much greater velocity and innovation inside the Commonwealth Bank.”